Severo Sarduy and the Neo-Baroque Image of Thought in the Visual Arts

Chapter Four: Colors, Bodies, Voices, and the Click-Clack of Theater

159 Chapter Four Colors, Bodies, Voices, and the Click-Clack of Theater Joan Brossa called his plays “poesia escènica,” and that may be a very good way to think of Sarduy’s poetic radio plays, for that indeed is what they are: plays that are poems, written/painted with Kandinsky’s colors. Unfortunately, to compare Sarduy’s poems to his plays, most of them published under the title Para la voz (1978),1 does them little justice; for if Sarduy’s poetry has received scant attention, his radio plays have received even less. This is regrettable, first because the radio plays are among the most beautiful texts Sarduy wrote in any genre, and second, because the theater was the operant framework for a number of his novels. “Además,” wrote Sarduy, “me gano la vida como periodista radiofónico, en Radio Francia Internacional. Pero no sólo las emisiones de radio, sino todo lo que escribo se presta para la difusión, es esencialmente vocal. Creo que no sólo mis poemas, sino hasta mis novelas ganan de ser leídas en alta voz” (OC-I/“Soy una Juana de Arco” 30).2 Consider that the protagonist of Gestos is a cabaret singer; that the first section of Cobra takes place at the “Teatro lírico de muñecas,” a burlesque brothel inhabited by transvestites in kitsch costumes; and that De donde son los cantantes not only begins in Havana’s Shanghai Theater, but the third section of the novel, “La Dolores Rondón,” as Roberto González Echevarría tells us, “fue inicialmente una pieza de radio-teatro” (“Memorias ” 137).3 Neo-Baroque or contemporary Mannerist literature deviates from the Baroque worldview (the Calderonian vision of gran teatro del mundo) in its post-Cartesian insistence that there is not and never was anything to uncover behind the world of appearances. What appears is all that there is and ever will be. This is why I have said from the very beginning that Mannerism 160 Chapter Four proper with its valorization of surface is what Sarduy worked into his own immanent aesthetics of transvestism and simulation . González Echevarría writes: Un rasgo que se destaca en la obra de Sarduy y que atraviesa toda la literatura neobarroca es la teatralidad; la insistencia en el teatro como lugar de la acción; la representación de los personajes como cantantes, actores, vedettes, y la tendencia a describir la figura humana, el cuerpo, como pelele, marioneta , muñeco, como espacio para la inscripción y la pintura. (“Memorias” 131) Sarduy’s theater is a theater of gestos—not in the Artaudean sense of a body whose ritualized gestures express the primeval metaphysics of ancient religious practices, but rather one whose gestures can be apprehended in and of themselves—as in the dance/theater of Robert Wilson (e.g., Einstein on the Beach). And this is so because for Sarduy to be human is to be a body— “un cubo blanco” (OC-I/Flamenco 144, 145)—that may be compared with one of Larry Bell’s fiberglass bodies. The in/animate is the human, or as Lyotard has articulated it, the in/human, of which thought cannot be predicated in the absence of a body. In Artaud, the body signals through the flames the content of an interiority that calls for its deciphering (e.g., a Balinese ketjak ritual), while for Sarduy the body of a ketjak ritual is primarily the presentation (and not the representation) of desiringmachines . Thus, the surface that is “tradition” is easily turned into the empty signs of consumerist kitsch: for sale at tourist kiosks everywhere. Made with words, electronic sounds, and images, Sarduy’s radio plays recall Kurt Schwitters’s genre deconstructive “Merz”: sound poetry, theater, sculpture, etc., conceived in machinic terms—what Richard Wagner called the “total work.” But it was the stage that Schwitters considered as the catalyst to bring together other genres and art forms. “The total Merz artwork is . . . the Merz stage, which so far I have been able to work out only theoretically,” wrote Schwitters. He continued: The Merz stage knows only the fusion of all the parts into the total work. Materials for the stage are all solid, liquid, gaseous bodies, such as white wall, man, barbed-wire fence, water stream, blue distance, light cone . . . .The material for 161 Colors, Bodies, Voices, Theater the score consists of all...